Soyo P4S Dragon Ultra Plus Motherboard Review

The P4S Dragon Ultra itself is a very colour oriented system board; the PCB is black, and each of the components has been colour coded for ease of installation. The PCI slots are all purple, the IDE-RAID connectors are yellow while the primary and secondary are blue and white respectively. The memory DIMM's and FDD connector are both black, while the 4X AGP is brown and the socket 478 Beige.

The Soyo P4S Dragon is based on the SiS 645 chipset which was one of the first to bring DDR capabilities to the Intel Pentium 4 platform. With a bus speed of 400MHz, and support for up to 3GB of DDR333/DDR266/DDR200 memory there is plenty of room for power. Add to that the onboard 5.1 channel audio, and 6 PCI slots and you have one very fully featured motherboard. IDE RAID is taken care of with the highpoint controller chipset, and unlike some earlier mPGA478 mainboards only one extra 4-pin 12V power connector is required.

Soyo P4S Dragon Ultra Plus Motherboard
	Ships with the following: IDE ATA33 Cable IDE ATA66/100 Cable FDD Cable USB bracket Driver CD-ROM FastTrak100 Driver Norton Antivirus 2001 Instructions

Around back we see a typical colour coded set of IO ports with two big exceptions - the USB ports are in a different location and there is an onboard RJ-45 Ethernet jack. A custom IO plate is shipped with the motherboard as standard cases will not be ready to accommodate the unique placement of ports.

Onboard 10/100 NIC is a blessing, and a bit of a curse. After using the Soyo for a few weeks on a broadband connection we experienced some problems with lost MAC addresses. However, everything was solved by manually entering in a new MAC address in the BIOS.

Further rummaging through the box made it seem like Soyo had included every possible accessory one could imagine. Along with the 150 page manual came three sets of 80-pin IDE connectors, one FDD cable, a driver CD and some decent bundled software (Adobe active share, Norton ghost, Norton anti-virus). The best part was yet to come however as tucked under the cardboard supports was a front USB panel called the "Soyo Box", and the 6-channel super audio riser card. The 3.5" SB-P4SX Box comes with an adaptor to fit 5.25" bays and brings four USB ports to the front of the case.

Within that adaptor box there are two small LED's which bring network activity lights up front. I can't help but think Soyo should have gone the extra step and thrown in some audio jacks or at least an headphone port and volume wheel in there as well like Abit has done with the MediaXP.

Incidently the USB ports on the Box connect to the mainboard headers by two pairs of nice shielded cable. The super audio riser comes with 6 ports (2x optical, 2x RCA, 2x mini headphone jack).